Ronda - Fascinating Fact 5 - Stand and Deliver
El Tragabuches had a fine
restaurant in Ronda dedicated to him.
During the Napoleonic wars, many Andalucians took to the hills to organise resistance movements. These often took the form of banditry, attacking soldiers or rich travellers as they took the isolated, treacherous mountain road through the Sierra de Ronda from inland Andalucia down to the coast. Another motive for banditry was social injustice (rich landowners, poor peasants). The English had a romantic notion of the beautiful Andalucian countryside full of dangerous bandits, stopping coaches and flirting with their female occupants before divesting them, with great courtesy, of their valuables (El Tempranillo fulfilled this ideal perfectly). Another famous local bandolero (outlaw) was Jose Ulloa Navarro, El Tragabuches, a Ronda bullfighter from Romero's school (see FACT I) and smuggler, who killed his wife and co-worker, and was forced to go on the run.
- Fact 1 - Ronda's most famous son, Pedro Romero, changed the face of bullfighting
- Fact 2 - English painter David Bomberg lived and worked in Ronda in the 1950s, producing some of the finest landscapes of Spain
- Fact 3 - Five thousand-year-old cave paintings near Ronda are an unusual and fascinating experience
- Fact 4 - Ernest Hemingway loved bullfighting, and he loved Ronda - so much so that he used it as a setting for his novels
- Fact 5 - The mountains around Ronda were a popular hide-out for bandits in the 19th century
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